Nice and detailed bug report, Pim.

I'm also seeing the same problems with 2.00b3 and b7.

I have a 4gb Mk II that's about a year and half old. It also has about 10,000 songs on it and has about 200mb of free space left.

When doing a random play on the entire playlist I get the same lockups. Usually it displays the info screen for the first (random) song, but then never plays. The disk activity icon is there with the activity "light" on. I've waited up to two minutes to see if it ever recovers but it doesn't. Sometimes button switches work but usually the unit is hung up right at that spot.

If I power cycle the player then it's usually fine and plays the song that came up first in the random play list.

I've re-synced the player numerous times since I'm currently going through my entire 600 CD collection and re-ripping the entire collection to VBR, adding the year to the tags and fixing all the other tag problems.

One thing I've been planning on trying (but keep forgetting) is to limit the size of the random playlist. I remember that you can edit the properties of the playlist to only include a percentage of all songs in the random playlist. Thus I could set it to only use 10% of the total songs when creating a random playlist. Since I never get THAT far into a random play before selecting something specific it shouldn't alter my play style at all.

I'll let you know if that helps.

David Schmidt